Translated by

Daniel Heller- Roazen

Stanford

University

Press

Stanford

California

HOMO SACER

Sovereign Power

and Bare Life

Giorgio Agamben

l.

Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life

was originally published as Homo sacer: If potere sovrano e fa

nuda vita, © 1995 Giulio Einaudi editore s.p.a.

Stanford University PressStanford, California

© 1998 by the Board of Trustees of the

Leland Stanford Junior University

Printed in the United States of America

CIP data appear at the end of the book

Contents

Introduction

PART ONE: THE LOGIC OF SOVEREIGNTY

§ I The Paradox of Sovereignty

§ 2 'Nomos Basileus'

§ 3 Potentiality and Law

§ 4 Form of Law

Threshold

PART TWO: HOMO SACER

§ I Homo Sacer

§ 2 The Ambivalence of the Sacred

§ 3 Sacred Life

§ 4 'Vitae Necisque Potestas'

§ 5 Sovereign Body and Sacred Body

§ 6 The Ban and the Wolf

Threshold

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The Logic of Sovereignty

neither the simple absence of work nor (as in Bataille) a sovereign anduseless form of negativity. The only coherent way to understand in­operativeness is to think of it as a generic mode of potentiality that'is notexhausted (like individual action or collective action understood as the

sum of individual actions) in a transitus depotentia ad actum.

§ Threshold

In laying bare the irreducible link uniting violence and law,

Benjamin's "Critique of Violence" proves the necessary and, even

today, indispensable premise of every inquiry into sovereignty. In

Benjamin's analysis, this link shows itself to be a dialectical oscilla­tion between the violence that posits law and the violence that

preserves it. Hence the necessity of a third figure to break thecircular dialectic of these two forms of violence:

The law of this oscillation [between the violence that posits law and the

violence that preserves it] rests on the fact that all law-preserving vio­lence, in its duration, indirectly weakens the lawmaking violence rep­resented by it, through the suppression of hostile counterviolence ....This lasts until either new forces or those earlier suppressed triumph

over the violence that had posited law until now and thus found a new

law destined to a new decay. In the interruption of this cycle, which ismaintained by mythical forms of law, in the deposition oflaw and allthe forces on which it depends (as they depend on it) and, therefore,finally in the deposition of State power, a new historical epoch isfounded. ("Zur Kritik der Gewalt," p. 202)

The definition of this third figure, which Benjamin calls "divine

violence," constitutes the central problem of every interpretation of

the essay. Benjamin in fact offers no positive criterion for itsidentification and even denies the possibility of recognizing it in

The Logic of Sovereignty

the concrete case. What is certain is only that it neither posits nor

preserves law, but rather "de-poses" (entsetzt) it. Hence its capacityto lend itself to the most dangerous equivocations (which is provenby the scrutiny with which Derrida, in his interpretation of the

essay, guards against it, approximating it-with a peculiar misun­

derstanding-to the Nazi "Final Solution" ["Force of Law," pp.1044-45]).

It is likely that in 1920, at the time Benjamin was working on the

"Critique," he had not yet read Schmitt's Political Theology, whose

definition of sovereignty he would cite five years later in his book

on the Baroque mourning play. Sovereign violence and the state of

exception, therefore, do not appear in the essay, and it is not easy to

say where they would stand with respect to the violence that posits

law and the violence that preserves it. The root of the ambiguity ofdivine violence is perhaps to be sought in precisely this absence.

The violence exercised in the state of exception clearly neither

preserves nor simply posits law, but rather conserves it in suspend­ing it and posits it in excepting itself from it. In this sense,

sovereign violence, like divine violence, cannot be wholly reduced

to either one of the two forms of violence whose dialectic the essay

undertook to define. This does not mean that sovereign violencecan be confused with divine violence. The definition of divine

violence becomes easier, in fact, precisely when it is put in relation

with the state of exception. Sovereign violence opens a zone ofindistinction between law and nature, outside and inside, violence

and law. And yet the sovereign is precisely the one who maintains

the possibility of deciding on the two to the very degree that he

renders them indistinguishable from each other. As long as thestate of exception is distinguished from the normal case, the dialec­

tic between the violence that posits law and the violence that

preserves it is not truly broken, and the sovereign decision even

appears simply as the medium in which the passage from the one tothe other takes place. (In this sense, it can be said both that

sovereign violence posits law, since it affirms that an otherwise

forbidden act is permitted, and that it conserves law, since the

content of the new law is only the conservation of the old one.) In

Threshold

any case, the link between violence and law is maintained, even at

the point of their indistinction.The violence that Benjamin defines as divine is instead situated

in a zone in which it is no longer possible to distinguish between

exception and rule. It stands in the same relation to sovereignviolence as the state of actual exception, i'n the eighth thesis, does to

the state of virtual exception. This is why (that is, insofar as divineviolence is not one kind of violence among others but only the

dissolution of the link between violence and law) Benjamin can say

that divine violence neither posits nor conserves violence, but

deposes it. Divine violence shows the connection between the twoviolences-and, even more, between violence and law-to be the

single real content of law. "The function of violence in juridicalcreation," Benjamin writes, at the only point in which the essay

approaches something like a definition of sovereign violence, "istwofold, in the sense that lawmaking pursues as its end, withviolence as the means, what is to be established as law, but at the

moment of its instatement does not depose violence; rather, at this

very moment of lawmaking and in the name of power, it specifi­

cally establishes as law not an end immune and independent fromviolence, but one necessarily and intimately bound up with it"

("Zur Kritik der Gewalt," pp. 197-98). This is why it is not by

chance that Benjamin, with a seemingly abrupt development,concentrates on the bearer of the link between violence and law,

which he calls "bare life" (bloJSesLeben), instead of defining divine

violence. The analysis of this figure-whose decisive function in

the economy of the essay has until now remained unthought­

establishes an essential link between bare life and juridical violence.

Not only does the rule oflaw over the living exist and cease to exist

alongside bare life, but even the dissolution of juridical violence,which is in a certain sense the object of the essay, "stems ... from

the guilt of bare natural life, which consigns the living, innocent

and unhappy, to the punishment that 'expiates' the guilt of barelife-and doubtless also purifies [entsuhnt] the guilty, not of guilt,

however, but of law" (ibid., p. 200).

In the pages that follow, we will attempt to develop these sugges-

66 The Logic of Sovereignty Threshold

tions and to analyze the link binding bare life to sovereign power.

According to Benjamin, the principle of the sacred character oflife,

which our age assigns to human life and even to animal life, can be

of no use either in clarifying this link or in calling into question the

rule oflaw over the living. To Benjamin, it is suspicious that what is

here proclaimed as sacred is precisely what, according to mythical

thought, is "the bearer destined to guilt: bare life," almost as if there

were a secret complicity between the sacredness of life and the

power of law. "It might," he writes, "be well worth while to

investigate the origin of the dogma of the sacredness of life. Per­

haps, indeed probably, it is relatively recent, the last mistaken

attempt of the weakened Western tradition to seek the saint it had

lost in cosmological impenetrability" (ibid., p. 202).We shall begin by investigating precisely this origin. The princi­

ple of the sacredness of life has become so familiar to us that we

seem to forget that classical Greece, to which we owe most of our

ethico-political concepts, not only ignored this principle but did

not even possess a term to express the complex semantic sphere that

we indicate with the single term "life." Decisive as it is for the

origin of Western politics, the opposition between zoe and bios,

between zen and eu zen (that is, between life in general and the

qualified way oflife proper to men), contains nothing to make one

assign a privilege or a sacredness to life as such. Homeric Greek

does not even know a term to designate the living body. The term

soma, which appears in later epochs as a good equivalent to our

term "life," originally meant only "corpse," almost as iflife in itself,

which for the Greeks was broken down into a plurality of forms

and elements, appeared only as a unity after death. Moreover, evenin those societies that, like classical Greece, celebrated animal

sacrifices and occasionally immolated human victims, life in itself

was not considered sacred. Life became sacred only through a series

of rituals whose aim was precisely to separate life from its profanecontext. In the words of Benveniste, to render the victim sacred, it

is necessary to "separate it from the world of the living, it is

necessary that it cross the threshold that separates the two uni­

verses: this is the aim of the killing" (Le vocabulaire, p. 188).

If this is true, then when and in what way did a human life firstcome to be considered sacred in itself? Until now we have been con­

cerned with delineating the logical and topological structure of sov­

ereignty. But what is excepted and captured in sovereignty, and who

is the bearer of the sovereign ban? Both Benjamin and Schmitt, if

differently, point to life ("bare life" in Benjamin and, in Schmitt,

the "real life" that "breaks the crust of a' mechanism rigidifiedthrough repetition") as the element that, in the exception, finds

itself in the most intimate relation with sovereignty. It is thisrelation that we must now clarify.